Better Than Pentatonic? The Amazing Blues Scale No One Talks About

let's say you come to play a solo over 12 Bar Blues what scales do you need to know minor pentatonic major pentatonic the blues scale or even heaven forbid mixolydian well what if there was a pattern so simple you always knew which notes to play and at the same time unlocked much more advanced flows Concepts like playing their changes and blending minor and major together well of course there is and I'm about to show you how you can create a solo like this [Music] foreign [Music] later but let's start by learning a really simple scale pattern we can use firstly all we need to do is play any e-shaped bar chord like this a here at the fifth fret then we can remove our little finger and this becomes a more bluesy sounding A7 now let's take the notes just from the top four strings from this chord and this forms the first part of our scale shape as these notes G C sharp E and A are chord tones directly from our original A7 chord they will always work perfectly when we solo over that chord but there's an extra little bit of special Source we need for blues and that's this little movement here on the G string from the minor third up to the major third of the chord it's the difference between an A minor chord and an a major chord as you can hear it has instant blue sphere we can either Hammer onto it slide across or make a little Bend up to it the second part of our shape is simply all the notes on these same top four strings just two Frets up from wherever we started so for a it'll be here at the seventh fret now these notes a d f sharp and B all come from the a major scale so we can think of them as bright sounding major Melody notes we can add alongside our chord tones an easy way to think of this shape is that wherever our bar chord starts we have all the notes of that fret on the top four strings then all the notes two Frets up and then this little bridge in between on the G string so two bars with a bridge in between now as a scale it might look like this [Music] I call this the blues chord scale and you'll see through this video this is a hugely powerful pattern so now we know the shape let's take a look at some licks to get us started soloing firstly this lick now this is a great way to open up a solo it immediately brings in the minor to Major slide for blues feel and then up through the scale to land on the root note which really outlines our a chord now you could vary the second part for example by playing a sliding double stop on the top two strings within our scale pattern then this lick here is a blues classic which gives us a moving one chord to four chord kind of vibe you see it fits perfectly within our pattern and has this bluesy hammer on on the G string putting these two licks together we get something like this [Music] and I mentioned earlier that this concept opens up more Advanced Techniques so let's see how it easily enables us to play with changes by playing the changes we mean creating lead lines in a way that the listener can still hear the underlying chords changing throughout the solo so taking the licks we just learned the beauty of our pattern is we can now move them to any chord so we can start out playing down here on the a chord but then when our progression moves up to D the following the Q of a and play exactly the same licks in the position of the new chord [Music] you see our whole Blues chord scale pattern shifts up to the 10th fret where the D chord starts so not only do all these notes fit perfectly over that D chord they actually spell out the chord in the listener's ear as you can hear we now have a solo that clearly articulates that chord chain from a up to D [Music] then when the five chord comes around which will be an e we can do exactly the same again [Music] thank you now of course you're not always going to want to play identical licks over each chord but just with this simple example you start to hear the huge amount of potential this approach gives now I can hear some of you saying this is all well and good but it's not really that full fat blues sound I'm looking for where are all those tasty bends and darker Blue Notes I love back to our Blues called scale shape in the a position and let's just focus on these top three strings now what we find is just outside of our shape just one fret up there are three darker minor sounding notes we can access so on the G string here at the eighth fret we get an E flat which is the really dark blue note from the a minor scale on the B string we get a g the flat seven from a major and then on the high e we get a c the minor third from a major two great ways to access these notes firstly string bending to a little half step Bend on any of these top three strings from our Blues chord scale immediately takes us up to a darker bluesier sound [Music] ly it works really well to play these notes directly but not linger on them for example you could glance off them as Grace notes like this together [Music] it's the moving run like this now of course you can move this around the guitar and access these notes from any chord so by adding any of these extra notes we automatically create Blended major and minor tones which is kind of the Holy Grail for intermediate blues players now anyone interested in theory may have noticed that our pattern now contains every note from the minor pentatonic major pentatonic minor blues scale major blues scale and the mixolydian so every note we might need is right here in this shape so now we know how this pattern works and the concepts it can open up for us let's go back to that solo I played at the start and see how it all comes together [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] there's a link to the top below so I want to spell out every note I'm playing but rather explain my overall approach so I started on a the one chord with that same lip that we saw earlier [Music] and this was really the basis for the whole solo then the same start pointing to Bar three but then bringing in on those bluesy little bends and then again another one there then we're moving up to the D chord I was using this same type of technique again but I was playing it obviously now in this position but I actually played it so this second part came first as an anticipation just before the first beat that the D started on so I landed here with this little hammer on and all these chord tones from the D7 chord right on that first beat of the bar then over that D chord I use the double stop slide on the top two strings followed by a couple of bends on this note the first time also using the note on the high e at the same time then back to the a position for some partial chords followed by this double stop slide up to those two darker Blue Notes [Music] then up to the E position and very similar licks again [Music] notice I'm using that little half step bend on the high e there up to the minor third for that extra bluesy feel and then back down to the a position I'm going to use that exact same Bend again [Music] after that bend there runs using these outside darker Blue Notes on the B and G strings [Music] and then back to the root and then end on a rootless 13 voicing just to give us a little bit of jazz to finish off on [Music] thank you [Music] so I hope that was useful thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jules Guitar

Views: 303,150

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Id: QQmwZrAmGsA

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023